Posted on 03/10/2007 3:59:24 PM PST by Ellesu
SAN FRANCISCO - Even on a weekday in winter, the Castro district vibrates with energy, most of it male. Men holding hands, walking dogs and lounging at cafes have long been the main attraction in a neighborhood known as a gay mecca the world over. Yet where visitors see a living monument to gay pride, longtime community leader Brian Basinger sees a cultural enclave at risk of becoming a faded museum piece - or worse, a place where gay men may one day feel like they don't belong.
"When I see a stroller now, I see it as someone who evicted a person with AIDS, right or wrong," said Basinger, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transexual Democratic Club.
For more than 30 years, most big cities have had a district either explicitly or implicitly understood to be the place to go if you were gay - the West Village and Chelsea in New York City, Washington's Dupont Circle, Boston's South End.
But as gays and lesbians win legal rights and greater social acceptance, community activists worry these so-called "gayborhoods" are losing their relevance. Like the bedsheet-sized rainbow flag rippling majestically at the intersection marking the entrance to the Castro, they are at a historical
crossroads. "What I've heard from some people is, `We don't need the Castro anymore because essentially San Francisco is our Castro,"' said Don Romesburg, who co-chairs the GLBT Historical Society.
Don Reuter, a New York writer who is researching a book on the rise and fall of a dozen gay neighborhoods in the U.S., has observed the same trend in cities as far-flung as New Orleans, Philadelphia and Seattle. He found "Disneyfied" places boasting chain stores, restaurants catering to a diverse clientele and "cleared of any reference to sex."
"What makes these neighborhoods gay? Not much," concluded Reuter, who predicts that outside New York, San Francisco and a handful of other cities, neighborhoods with a significant gay presence will not survive.
In the early 1970s, an atmosphere of wild abandon prevailed in districts often referred to as "gay ghettos." Men who had kept their sexual orientations hidden reveled in the freedom of leading openly gay lives for the first time. The nonstop party dragged to a painful halt in the 1980s with the onset of AIDS, Reuter said, but the crisis also solidified gay communities even as it decimated them.
Now, as the fear of AIDS has abated, the neighborhoods have become attractive to developers and investors trying to encourage families and empty-nesters to return to city centers, said Reuter.
Besides the brigades of baby strollers in the Castro, ominous signs include the security gates installed last year by a local hotel to discourage "cruising," and the recent closings of two longtime stores, one that sold leather goods and the other bath products. National retail chains like Pottery Barn and Diesel now occupy prominent Castro locations.
Several nonprofit agencies serving the gay community have also moved out due to rising rents. Meanwhile, 500 new apartments and condominiums are planned for the area, half of which have been designated as "family housing."
But no one is suggesting that the Castro has been overrun by heterosexuals just yet.
After the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown, Mass., the neighborhood has the nation's highest concentration of same-sex couples, according to 2005 census estimates. And San Francisco as a whole ranks first among cities, with gay and lesbian residents making up 15 percent of the population.
"I think people are looking for something to worry about," said Betty Sullivan, a writer and event producer who lives in the Castro. "I take the fact that some straight people want to live here as a compliment."
But some activists point to cities with less-established gay districts as a sign of what could happen.
Honolulu's Kuhio district stands vacant after its gay bars were dispersed in the late 1980s. In Atlanta's Midtown, once the gayest area of that city, gay nightclubs recently have given way to condominiums.
When Basinger walks through the Castro these days, he see the apartment building where he watched friends with AIDS die, too pricey these days for someone young, old or sick to afford. Or the corner where his efforts at community organizing are met with yawns. Up the street, the raunchy window displays at sex toy shops have brought complaints from parents, both gay and straight.
"We have Chinatown and Japantown and so forth, and that's important for minority communities in this country, to have a place where they can get a sense of being the majority," said Joe Curtin, an architect who serves as president of Castro Area Planning Action. "But if you took those away, you would still have China and Japan. If the Castro goes away as a gay neighborhood, there is nowhere else."
From 2000 to 2005, the 10 states with the biggest increases in the percentage of gay couples were all in the Midwest, says Gary Gates, a demographer for the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA that specializes in sexual orientation and the law.
"Thirty years ago, if I lived in the Midwest and I was gay, my thought was I would go to San Francisco or New York," Gates said. "Now, a person can go to Kansas City and find a fairly active and open gay community."
"When you are a minority, you have to be the wedge, and the Castro is it," he said. "The people who are coming in here and colonizing the Castro, they are exercising their priorities. Whether they are heterosexual priorities or economic priorities, they are not our priorities."
Homos....A minority? Isn't that special. Barf.
Well, the homosexuals have gotten their wish; social mores have eroded to the point where MTV regularly trundles out gay people as fashionable. Being gay is not the scandal it once was. And do you know what? Homosexuality is probably not nearly as erotic, either. No taboo, no trangression, no eroticism.
AND now that they're no longer some alient "other", they don't have half the cohesion they once did.
So now they're overflowing with sex (oh, and, uh...DISEASE), but no eroticism, no kids, and NO COMMUNITY.
Pyrrhic victory if there every was one...hahahah! Nice going, "gays"...!
Gay people don't have an agenda, anymore than there is a VRWC. (That doesn't mean that they are useful idiots to the international left) Gay people who were closeted and lived in fear of being fired and abandoned by their loved ones now just want the same things as everyone else, which is acceptance, the ability to have families and live their lives. Social conservatives understand that this will further undermine the family unit, but the genie has been out of the bottle for over 30 years and this is trend is the logical progression of the "Me" generation, post-modernism, the special rights movement, narcissism and consumerism.
I was at a home school convention last year at Veterans Stadium and as we were leaving we noticed a little street fair across the road. We were going to go and have fun but just before we pulled in we discovered what kind of fair it was.... a homosexual "celebration". People were walking around half dressed groping each other.
Needless to say, we left Columbus in a hurry.
I don't think homosexuals ever wanted to be seen as "normal." Rather, they want to be accepted, but as special. Big difference.
What??
Homosexuals have moved waaaay past tolerance. And even past acceptance. It is now to the point where soon you will be incarcerated for a "hate crime" for not tolerating or accepting (joyfully appreciating and promoting) their lifestyle.
If you're alive to be gay, thank a heterosexual.
In June those "folks" have their fair and parade. I assume you were at Vet's Memorial Auditorium on West Broad. That would put you in range of the freaks.
That's true. But not all Gays are members of the radical groups pushing this agenda.
Thanks!
That doesn't mean that they are useful idiots to the international left)
Ooops- Meant to say "That doesn't mean they aren't useful idiots...
Tough. People can move in as they please, and you know the residents hate that icky nuclear family stuff.
freepmail me your post, please
That always/never—everybody/nobody paradigm will get one in trouble every time. No problem.
LOL!!! Good one.
Let's get to the TRUTH of the matter here. Young people of ANY ILK can't live in SF, period, end of story, unless they have a trust fund or are in a management job.
That's what the TRUTH is, it's just economics.
Don't bother to live in SF/LA/NYC without truckloads of money.
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